Janet Vogel joined the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Secretary in 2018 with more than 25 years of experience, and has been instrumental in spearheading the department’s adoption of a cybersecurity risk management philosophy.
Under her leadership, HHS has implemented more comprehensive toolsets that facilitate risk-based decision-making. Vogel, who serves as chief information security officer, also led the expansion of cybersecurity risk management programs at the enterprise level, and ensured cybersecurity risk is a key component of HHS’ overall enterprise risk management approach.
Through the implementation of capabilities such as the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center and Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices initiatives, Vogel spearheaded efforts to engage the health care and public health sector on cybersecurity issues that could impact or interrupt health care delivery and patient care.
By using existing HHS tools and technologies, Vogel led efforts to develop proactive, automated solutions leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. These solutions comb HHS cybersecurity data sets flagging potential cybersecurity issues while reducing the volume of manual activities required by analysts. Among other benefits, this has allowed the team to identify previously unknown phishing campaigns and allowed command and control infrastructure to be taken down before traditional perimeter defenses are aware of the activity.
Why Watch:
Throughout her tenure at HHS, Vogel has worked to improve the department’s performance regarding compliance with Federal Information Security Modernization Act cross-agency priority goals. This has increased not only the department’s performance against key cybersecurity metrics, but strengthened the overall program and contributes to increased performance on HHS’ Federal Information Technology Reform Act scorecards.